“The more I think about it, the more I’m like: When Conor takes a break, Nate takes a break,” Alvarez continued. “Conor’s like, ‘I ain’t fighting until August,’ and Nate’s like, ‘Well, I ain’t fighting until July,’ or some sh*t. I guess his ego doesn’t let him say, ‘I just want to fight Conor.’ Just say it. Like, just be honest with everyone. If that’s who you want to fight, there’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t call everyone out if you don’t have any intention of fighting anybody.

I think Alvarez is 100% correct.

I’ve said it before: Diaz has created in his mind a false equivalence between himself and Conor McGregor. He thinks because Conor makes the big money, and he’s fought Conor before, then he should also be able to ask for just as much money. That’s not how it works.

Jack White has discouraged phone use at his live shows for years. In the past, he’s made a point of going onstage and asking fans to keep their phones in their pockets. Now, for his upcoming US tour, he’s trying a more aggressive approach. Fans will be asked to keep their phones secured in a Yondr-branded pouch that can only be unlocked in certain areas of the venue, NME reports.

A statement released today by White’s team says that concertgoers will be banned from taking photos, audio, or video during the tour. “We think you’ll enjoy looking up from your gadgets for a little while and experience music and our shared love of it IN PERSON,” the statement reads, according to NME.

These topics are absent in China’s technology companies, where the pace of work is furious. Here, top managers show up for work at about 8am and frequently don’t leave until 10pm. Most of them will do this six days a week — and there are plenty of examples of people who do this for seven. Engineers have slightly different habits: they will appear about 10am and leave at midnight. Beyond the week-long breaks for Chinese new year and the October national holiday, most will just steal an additional handful of vacation days. Some technology companies also provide a rental subsidy to employees who choose to live close to corporate HQ.

In California, this sort of pace might be common for the first couple of years of a company, but then it will slow. In China, by contrast, it is quite usual for the management of 10 and 15-year-old companies to have working dinners followed by two or three meetings. If a Chinese company schedules tasks for the weekend, nobody complains about missing a Little League game or skipping a basketball outing with friends. Little wonder it is a common sight at a Chinese company to see many people with their heads resting on their desks taking a nap in the early afternoon.

Fuck the editor who wrote the title of this article, and fuck Michael Moritz for writing the article.

Silicon Valley or anywhere else in the first world would be wise to not follow China’s lead. The whole (empty) promise of computers and the Internet was that we would be able to work remotely! And work more efficiently! Oh joy of joys!

It’s a cliché but it’s true: the goal is to work smarter, not longer. It’s also true that humans fill their work week to the allotted number of hours. If we worked four 8-hour days per week (32 hours) instead of five 8-hour weeks (40 hours) the vast majority of people at desk jobs would get just as much work done.

All of that is to say that cassette tapes, an audio format we all thought died an ignominious death in the ‘90s, are back, baby. According to Nielsen Music’s sales numbers, the format is having a quiet revolution. Just in 2017, sales for cassette tapes were up by 35% over 2016, with 174,000 new cassettes sold. Which isn’t, like, huge, but for a retro format that’s not vinyl, that’s pretty incredible.

And leading that revolution is the superheroic maestro of ‘80s nostalgia, Guardians of the Galaxy. The top three selling tapes are all Guardians joints: the first and second volumes of the Awesome Mix and the first volume of the Cosmic Mix. If you’re looking for proof that Marvel and Disney are reshaping pop culture in their image, look no further. Star Lord is so powerful he can revive dead media formats.

This is cute. My guess is this surge in cassette sales is driven by Millennials, but I have no idea.

As someone who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, I was deep into the mix tape culture. One of my favorite things to do was not only arrange great collections of songs, but I took it a step further. I figured out how to to take the white ‘left’ and red ‘right’ audio cables from the VCR (combined with the yellow ‘video’ cable this was know as ‘component cable’) and feed them into the left and right AUDIO IN inputs in the back of my stereo so I could sample my favorite clips from movies between tracks.

The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.

The fact that cassette tapes were an analog format meant it took time to make these mix tapes. They weren’t something you could slap together in 5 minutes like you can with a playlist on Spotify.

I’d be curious if kids spend thoughtful time creating playlists like we did with mix tapes. They probably don’t.